An article in today’s Washington Post quotes a distinguished American academic as saying that –
if … the voters pull a Truman [i.e. if McCain-Palin confound the polls and the pundits by winning], that is going to be the end of whatever shred of credibility they have left.
That’s right. If McCain wins after all, we shall hear passionate denunciations of the US electorate. Bertolt Brecht wrote a famous poem after the East German uprisings of 1953:
The Solution
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Hat-tip: David Tothill, eagle-eyed as ever.
Confession: A good example of the power of the selective quotation. What the article actually said was this:
“If the mainstream media are wrong about Obama and the voters pull a Truman, that is going to be the end of whatever shred of credibility they have left,” says Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University’s College of Communication.
In other words, it was the mainstream media, not the voters, who would lose what’s left of their credibility. Pity!
Brian
Senator McCain and the Republicans over the water, and the Tories over here, bear-led (the appropriate term in present circumstances) by Cameron, a rather battered Osborne, and Hague, are demanding cuts in government spending — for example, the Tories' advocacy of a freeze on local council spending, and the GOP calling for a freeze in all federal government spending — as a proper response to the recession. The Tories denounce Gordon Brown for having failed, when Chancellor of the Exchequer under, or alongside, Blair, to "put money aside for a rainy day" when the going was good, implying a condemnation of the extent of government spending on public services in the past decade which made a start in making up for the scandalous lack of investment in them during the Tory years that preceded it. They talk about the UK's budget deficit and borrowing as if these were evidence of profligacy — in a recession! John McCain calls Barack Obama a 'socialist' (shock, horror! swoon!) for advocating tax cuts for 95 per cent of Americans and increased taxes on the remaining 5 per cent of rich individuals and corporations; he seems to think that only the rich, provided that they don't have to pay much tax, "create jobs".
It's as if Keynes had never existed. Are the Republicans and the Tories genuinely unaware that the way out of recession is increased, not deferred or frozen, public spending on projects which will generate jobs, put money in the hands of ordinary working people which they will spend and thus generate further demand which in turn stimulates investment, borrowing and spending? That to finance increased public spending by increasing overall taxation can only deepen and prolong the recession by damping down ordinary spending, so that it's essential to finance the additional expenditure out of more borrowing instead? That because the less well-off have a higher propensity to spend than the rich (who save a higher proportion of their incomes and thus contribute less to re-inflating the economy in a recession), re-distributing money from the rich to the less rich, including the poor, is an excellent anti-recession policy? That public borrowing to finance a budget deficit in a recession is absolutely essential, the very antithesis of profligacy?
If William Hague is aware of any of these elementary truths, he showed no sign of it in his BBC television interview this morning with Andrew Marr, ably backed up by the appalling Amanda Platell, even more than usually serpentine and partisan in her review of the press (to the evident annoyance of the equally partisan Alastair Campbell, also on the programme).
So there are two possible interpretations of the line being taken by these siren voices on the far right in the US and here in the UK: either they understand the elementary economics of dealing with recession, but pretend not to for the sake of damning the political opposition — in which case they are hypocritical frauds; or they don't, in which case they are economically illiterate. Either way, they should not be entrusted with the responsibilities of government in the hard times that lie ahead — "moving forward", as everyone now seems to say when they mean "in the future". Fortunately Senator Obama and Gordon Brown seem to understand these not-very-obscure realities and to be ready to apply them to the present discontents — if their respective electorates allow them to do so.
PS: Of course a policy of increased government spending on projects likely to create jobs quickly need not rule out cuts in non-productive public expenditure, such as on ID cards and the giant national data-base, aircraft carriers, the renewal of the Trident missile programme, and the insane profligacy accompanying much of the programme for the 2012 London Olympics, all cuts that could release funds for much more useful projects with much more short-term benefits for employment. These could usefully include spending on green projects designed to support the battle against global warming. But such cuts should clearly not be used to reduce government borrowing or the budget deficit.
Brian
One or two of Senator McCain's pronouncements on policy issues and other matters during the third and final debate raised some eyebrows.
Healthcare: McCain berates Obama for his proposed compulsory universal healthcare programme, preferring to give everyone a $5,000 tax credit and leaving it to individuals to spend it on health insurance if they feel so inclined. Housewives and mothers with layabout husbands or partners (surely such people exist even in the United States?) won't be too impressed by that. McCain also invokes the freedom of all Americans to choose the best healthcare scheme for themselves, their families "and their employees". And their employees? What kind of freedom is that? Under existing arrangements the power of employers to determine, in effect, the healthcare schemes that their employees may join is one of the most questionable aspect of healthcare in the US, at any rate as perceived by us unregenerate old socialists in Europe; to propose to perpetuate it seems perverse.
The recession: McCain seems to think that government spending should be cut — or at best frozen — at the start of a deep recession, rather than doubled or trebled or whatever it takes to create jobs and get demand and consumption going again. God help America if he becomes President and can't grasp that! He's right of course that this is no time to raise taxes, but this seems to be for conservative doctrinal reasons, not because he understands the dynamics of recession. Like the British Tories, he doesn't appear to understand that increases in government spending in a recession and reductions in taxes need to be funded by increased government borrowing, not by cutting government spending (although as Obama rightly pointed out, there should be plenty of scope for cutting government spending on things that don't create jobs and revive demand, and transferring it to things that do, such as infrastructure projects).
Promising to eliminate the budget deficit and to balance future budgets, as McCain did, looks equally misguided in a time of recession. Perhaps this is a throwback to Reaganomics and Thatcherism, guided by Mrs T's conviction that the economics of a country should be analogous in every detail to the economics of managing a Grantham grocery.
Neither of the candidates really seemed prepared to tackle head-on the grave issues raised by the imminent prospect of recession, nor the budgetary and fiscal implications of the huge-scale bailouts and recapitalisations of the banks from public funds. Perhaps to do so would have been too damaging electorally for the candidate brave enough to discuss these matters, if his opponent continued to pretend that they didn't exist. To become President, you have to look on the bright side, if you can find one.
Oil dependency: Senator McCain seems to be fixated on reducing American dependence on foreign oil (for national security reasons) but gives no hint of understanding the need to reduce dependence on any oil (for the sake of the future of the planet). Perhaps he's stuck with his running-mate's enthusiasm for the alarming slogan "Drill, baby, drill!", which must sound like plain common-sense if you're in Alaska. Senator Obama is reassuringly sound on the urgent need to develop alternative, green, fuels.
Down's Syndrome and autism: McCain clearly doesn't know the difference between the two. He went on at length about autism, in the context of Governor Palin's deep understanding of the condition and the need to do more to help the parents of autistic children (Sarah Palin's child has Down's Syndrome, not autism). But we're assured that he's not really confused at all:
McCain was not mixing up the two disorders, according to Palin spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt.
"McCain speaks often of autism because he has seen families who are deeply affected and he knows that the Palin family has been affected in a similar way by having a beautiful baby with special needs," she wrote in an e-mail. "He was drawing a parallel between parents of children with special needs."
(Washington Post, 16 October 2008)
Oh, yeah?
This might all sound like kicking a man when he's down. But he's not that far down, considering that he's the candidate of a party whose sitting President is the most unpopular in American history, presiding over a near-collapse of his country's banking system, the nationalisation of a raft of banks, and the imminence of a recession that threatens to deteriorate into a global depression, facing a gifted, articulate, intelligent and charismatic opponent. Considering that political background, it's hard to explain Obama's mostly slim leads in the major swing states (as well as nationally — only 4 points ahead according to today's Rasmussen poll). He should by rights be heading for a landslide. How important is the Bradley Effect going to be? It's not so much that some people — no-one knows how many — are going to vote against Obama because he's black but are ashamed to admit it to the pollsters, thus causing Obama's support to be overstated in the polls: it's just as much the tendency of racism-driven voters refusing to tell pollsters how they intend to vote and accordingly being put down as undecided, or else excluded from the figures altogether. Most American commentators are playing down the Bradley Effect as a likely major factor this time, but no-one really knows.
Two other factors are going to be significant: first, that voting has already begun in some states, and by the official polling day (4 November, less than three weeks away) around a third of the electorate may already have voted — probably good news for Obama. Secondly, that by now most voters have probably made up their minds and aren't likely to be swayed by fresh arguments or campaign advertisements, unless in the next seventeen days or so there's some major cataclysmic event that changes all the calculations — the likeliest being some terrorist attack, which would benefit McCain. Yet there's still a significant number of undecided voters, or at any rate voters who won't tell the polls how they mean to vote — probably most in practice going for McCain.
So it's too soon and rash to count Obama chickens. Remember not only Bradley but also Truman in 1948! We may yet find the result hingeing on the outcome of court challenges to the validity of a handful of hanging chads in Florida.
(Hat-tips: my wife and my daughter — the New York one.)
Brian
The 2008 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Martti Ahtisaari couldn't be more welcome or more spectacularly well earned. I have been a respectful admirer since I was involved for a few years in 
the Namibia independence negotiations. Ahtisaari, an experienced, calm, unpompous, shrewd, bulky Finn, was the United Nations Administrator appointed to represent the UN Secretary-General in the lengthy and arduous negotiations and later, in the run-up to independence, to run the huge, controversial territory in harness with the South African apartheid government which had finally been persuaded to abandon its claim to Nambia and to allow it to become independent under the original United Nations plan. His task was to arbitrate between the demands of the South Africans, those of SWAPO (the majority black party in Namibia demanding independence), of the other political parties, white, black and mixed, in Namibia, of the so-called Front Line States (the independent African countries bordering or near Namibia), of the western Contact Group (the five western countries which had been members of the Security Council when UN Security Council resolution 435 had been adopted in 1978 and which undertook the task of negotiating its implementation), of all the other governments and legitimate or self-appointed parties to this enormous dispute, ranging from the OAU to the Vatican, of the Security Council itself (constantly required to add fresh interpretations or new provisions to the parent resolution) — and all necessarily within the framework of resolution 435, the sacred text without which nothing could have been accomplished. There can be few men or women who could have succeeded in such a monumental task; Ahtisaari brought it off, and on 21 March 1990, Namibia became independent, twelve long years after the adoption of resolution 435.
Later, in 1999, Ahtisaari, by now the elected President of Finland, was one of three men who collectively brought about an end to the disastrous and illegal NATO bombing of Yugoslavia by persuading the Serbs, led by Milosevic, to accept a radically revised settlement plan under which the Serbs would withdraw their troops and police from the Serbian province of Kosovo, to be replaced by an international security force and administration. The other two authors of this achievement were Strobe Talbott, then US Deputy Secretary of State and a former Rhodes Scholar, and Viktor Chernomyrdin, former prime minister of Russia. The settlement negotiated by these three allowed — indeed obliged — NATO to terminate a bombing campaign that was increasingly obviously failing to achieve any of its several proclaimed objectives, killing increasing numbers of innocent civilians wholly unconnected with the Kosovo dispute, causing mounting unease among NATO member governments, and encouraging its principal cheer-leader, Tony Blair, to step up his vociferous public demands for a land invasion of Kosovo by NATO ground troops — something which, if attempted, might well have resulted in a calamity on the scale of the attack on Iraq four years later. For this alone Ahtisaari deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.
In addition to these extraordinary successes in Namibia and Kosovo, Ahtisaari was involved in successful international mediation efforts in Aceh (Indonesia), Iraq, Northern Ireland, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. He was also the author of the proposals for a kind of intermediate form of internationally supervised independence for Kosovo after the province's eight years of international administration, although there's room for a difference of view about whether this has helped the search for a long-term and durable settlement of that thorny problem. However, given the pressures for a short-term 'solution', that drawn up by Ahtisaari was almost certainly the best that could have been devised.
It's difficult to think of any single individual who has contributed so much to peace in his own lifetime as Martti Ahtisaari. His combination of diplomatic qualities constitutes a text-book for any aspiring practitioner of that much abused trade: an unrivalled capacity for viewing a dispute through the eyes of all the parties to it, identifying in each case real as distinct from asserted interests and objectives; a poker face that never gives away his thinking; willingness to talk and listen to anyone, however junior or however exalted, who might be able to contribute a new angle; a phenomenal memory; constant awareness of the need to stay rigorously within the boundaries of his mandate, however limited; courage, including bluntness when required; an ability to rise above his national identity so as to represent that amorphous entity, the international community, in complex negotiations, with all the extra authority that this status confers; and inexhaustible patience. What a man!
As a postscript, I note that the only other international figure with a comparable array of diplomatic talents and achievements whom I have ever encountered (apart possibly from Britain's and the UN's Brian Urquhart) was another Finnish international civil servant and mediator, Kurt Janssen, personal representative of the UN Secretary-General appointed to co-ordinate the colossal and controversial Ethiopian international famine relief operation in 1984-86. Janssen, alas, is no longer alive to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary achievement in Ethiopia (and for similar achievements in Cambodia and other crises). I was privileged to work closely with him and to observe his exceptional talents at close quarters during most of this period. It's no exaggeration to say that several million Ethiopians alive today owe their lives to Kurt Janssen. Janssen's book, written with Michael Harris and Angela Penrose, is an indispensable record of that crisis and the international relief effort which it generated. Let's hope that Finland keeps up the supply of outstanding international civil servants with the character and skills to promote peace and international humanitarian activity, commodities both precious and in regrettably short supply.
Brian
Two things in particular struck me as I watched all 90-odd minutes of the second US presidential debate between Senators McCain and Obama, held last night in Tennessee and available now on the Web (e.g.) here: first, the ever-widening gulf between political perceptions in (most of) the US and in (most of) Europe; and, secondly, the contrast in attitudes between the two candidates on the question of relations between America and the outside world.
(1) If the two Senators were competing for European votes, it's a million to one that Barack Obama would be 20 to 30 percentage votes ahead of John McCain in the opinion polls, and heading for a landslide victory. The American electorate had the two candidates neck-and-neck, with McCain slightly ahead in some polls, until the global financial system imploded, and enough Americans blamed the Republican administration for the failure to give Obama a narrow lead. In some states and some polls Obama's 
lead is still so slim as to be statistically within the margin of error. Is this really just a question of style, with McCain's folksy populist boastful chauvinism going down well with millions of Americans when most Europeans find it merely embarrassing? Is it only style that makes so many Americans hostile to Obama because his sophisticated, nuanced, sometimes hesitant manner strikes them as élitist, remote, professorial, detached, while to most Europeans it suggests someone whose intellect makes him on the face of it well qualified for high political office? Can it seriously be the case that millions of Americans vote for the candidate with whom they would most like to go out for a beer, and not the one who seems best equipped by character, intellect, judgement and declared policies to lead the most powerful nation on earth? How has it come about that 'liberal' is a dirty word across great swaths of the United States?
Of course public opinion and assumptions in some parts of the US, mainly in the big cities on the east and west coasts, closely resemble those in Europe; there's a gulf within America too. But neither George W Bush nor Senator John McCain would ever, surely, have come within a mile of winning an election for President of the United States of Europe, let alone winning two elections in a row.
(2) How America sees itself in relation to the rest of the world emerged in the debate as a sharp point of difference between the two candidates. McCain spoke of the US as a huge force for peace in the world, as a peace-keeper and peace-maker that should be ready to use its military might to resolve problems wherever they arise in the world:
…the fact is, America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world. My friends, we have gone to all four corners of the Earth and shed American blood in defense, usually, of somebody else's freedom and our own. So we are peacemakers and we're peacekeepers. But the challenge is to know when the United States of American can beneficially affect the outcome of a crisis, when to go in and when not, when American military power is worth the expenditure of our most precious treasure, American blood. And that question can only be answered by someone with the knowledge and experience and the judgment, the judgment to know when our national security is not only at risk, but where the United States of America can make a difference in preventing genocide, in preventing the spread of terrorism, in doing the things that the United States has done, not always well, but we've done because we're a nation of good.
Obama, in contrast, stressed the need to restore America's damaged standing in the world and to repair its international alliances without which the US would be impotent to address global challenges:
Senator McCain and I do agree, this is the greatest nation on earth. We are a force of good in the world. But there has never been a nation in the history of the world that saw its economy decline and maintained its military superiority. And the strains that have been placed on our alliances around the world and the respect that's been diminished over the last eight years has constrained us being able to act on something like the genocide in Darfur, because we don't have the resources or the allies to do everything that we should be doing. That's going to change when I'm president, but we can't change it unless we fundamentally change Senator McCain's and George Bush's foreign policy. It has not worked for America.
No prizes for guessing which of the two approaches comes closer to understanding and acknowledging the way the US has come to be seen in much of the outside world in the past eight years of the Bush administration. Statesmen as well as diplomats need to learn to understand how their governments and countries appear to others, both friends and especially adversaries, however unflattering the image.
Half of all American voters, according to one leading poll, are aware of international hostility to the Bush administration and its record, although the toddlers' nursery language of American pollsters' political discourse makes it impossible to make the vital distinction between hostility to the government and hostility to the country:
just 28% [of American voters] think other nations like America, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken Sunday night. Half of voters (50%) say other nations dislike the United States.
One of the McCain team might usefully encourage the GOP candidate to read and heed the Scottish poet's To a Louse, which famously finishes:
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion…
Well, I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been Sarah Palin. If she's going to be a heart-beat away from the presidency, let's hope that John McCain's heart will go on beating strongly for at least four years — or eight, if the worst comes to the worst a second time.
PS Andrew Sullivan's running commentary on the debate (comments rather confusingly in reverse chronological order) is well worth reading, including his final classic conclusion:
This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I’ve watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxford. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out. It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don’t really see how the McCain campaign survives this.
Brian
We returned, J and I, on Sunday from another cruise, this time aboard the biggest and newest ship in the UK cruise fleet, P&O's Ventura. Our private ship's log, or diary, of the two weeks afloat, is here. You can see a selection of the photographs I took, as we wended our way round the Mediterranean, here (guidance on how to view them is given at the end of the diary). They may give at least as much of the flavour as the diary. It will be obvious that this was no adventure cruise to brave the pirates of the Indian Ocean, to see giant penguins or the stone statues of the Galapagos Islands, or to experiment with our breathing in minus 30 temperatures at the South Pole. It was devoted almost entirely to kitsch.
It was a very good holiday, but somehow we don't think we'll want to cruise on quite such an enormous ship again, even if we can afford it once the slump now about to engulf us has done its work on our modest savings. And if Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah – but that's for the next post. Watch this space. 
Brian
